Building
a Bridge to the Aesthetic Experience: Artistic Virtual
Environments and Other Interactive Digital Art

Tobey Crockett

What is cyberspace? Like most
important questions, the answer depends very much on whom you ask. Cyberspace seems
to be highly mutable; it wears different guises for divergent questioners, depending very
much on what type of glasses they are wearing. And the computer certainly qualifies as a
strange kind of mirror -- the more deeply they scry its virtual depths, the more enthralled
many theorists become by its digitized mutual gaze. So vast is the quantity of information
available on the Internet that attempts to master the big picture cannot help but become
highly self-selecting. Yet most can agree that one of the standout characteristics of the
new digital paradigm which fascinates theorists and practitioners alike is its apparent
revolutionary character, its fundamental newness.

What I find interesting is what people do with the self expressive, creative opportunities
in 3D virtual worlds -- or "artistic virtual environments" -- in a social, interpersonal way
which has little to do with what people typically think of when they describe interactive
digital media. I am not addressing the human computer interface or persistent
environments, games and other interface driven spaces, which, to me, fee l too burdened
with prescribed behaviors. I like the freeform opportunities which can be present in the
less regimented worlds, places which tend to be viewed as the real backwaters of virtual
technologies.

The common critique one usually hears about such worlds is similar to the Gertrude Stein
remark about Oakland: there is no there, there. [1] Where I disagree is in the matter of
criteria by which one makes such a judgment. By what aesthetic criteria does this
conclusion come to apply to an entire class of cyber-spaces? I think that instead, plenty
occurs there, but we are not necessarily attuned to see what it is. We lack the proper
aesthetics that would allow us to actually observe something new.

The aesthetics which I propose
can aid us to see something fresh are an 'aesthetics of play and empathy.' These terms
have longstanding associations in a psychoanalytic context, as well as in other cultural
contexts including art history, Buddhist studies, feminism and the post-colonial, among
others.

The aesthetics which I propose
can aid us to see something fresh are an 'aesthetics of play and empathy.' These terms
have longstanding associations in a psychoanalytic context, as well as in other cultural
contexts including art history, Buddhist studies, feminism and the post-colonial, among
others. But before offering some concrete examples of these theoretical considerations, I
want to offer some context and ground my discussion in the particulars of a two year
experiment, an historical moment which functions as a kind of case study.

I began this work as a student as part of a virtual worlds theory and design team led by
of Dr. Michael Heim at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The team
developed a pair of virtual worlds in the ActiveWorlds browser, although we explored
other possibilities; this one suited our purposes best, being very easy to use and build in,
even for persons with no previous programming skills, such as myself. During 2000 and
2001, we came to host a series of live, inworld author chats -- events we called the
CyberForum- with a variety of digital theorists, initially drawn from the contributors of
Peter Lunenfeld's seminal book, The Digital Dialectic . [2] Guests included
William T. Mitchell, Brenda Laurel, Kate Hayles and perhaps a dozen more. [3]
Attendees included students located together in the computer lab, with other participants
located remotely -- including Heim , who 'telecommuted' from home on these occasions.
Many regulars who made time to participate were joining us from such diverse locations
as England , Sweden , Italy , Denmark , India and other parts of the US. Timing was
often a challenge for such global gatherings, and only committed night owls joined us
from the Pacific regions.

Figure 1: Architecture determines uses by avatars -- a path leading to a new speaking
point

A number of these participants, notably Mikael
Jakobsson in Malmo Sweden and Art Center faculty members Simon Niedenthal and
Tom Mancuso, also helped to build the world, a long-term and complex undertaking that
was done both collaboratively and asynchronously -- as a team, and as individual efforts
by students. The building of the worlds themselves became a very important part of the
process, and partially led to my emphasis on an aesthetics of play. First, it often required
more than one person to build correctly as multiple POV's were beneficial to object
placement, and secondly, as every architect knows, the type of spaces available in any
environment have a critical impact on the types of behavior which take place there. [Fig.
1]

Very early on, Heim and the team rejected the use of realism as a governing criterion for
the types of objects, avatars and environmental concerns which they wanted to explore.
Despite some concerns about 'user friendliness,' the team felt from the outset that guests
would be able to find their way without the usual cues, and indeed, many first time world
visitors experienced no difficulty navigating the distinctive ACCD environments. The
worlds had no gravity, no ground, few humanoid avatars, virtually no photorealism, no
text and a very atypical entry at ground zero. [Fig. 2] These choices accommodate more
flying, more exploring, more multi-level structures, greater access for novice builders,
more visually engaging abstraction and provide an entry for the symbolic. The new
aesthetic pioneered by Heim and the ACCD team proffered a general atmosphere which
favors artistic and performative choices, all to great interactive and social effect. The
ACCD worlds explored the possibilities of social architecture in virtual environments by
rejecting the standard conventions and formal concerns that are not required in the
immateriality of cyberspace.

Figure 2: An unusual ground zero creates a new experience for
visitors

In keeping with the formal
changes and the rejection of conventions more typical of realist spaces, Heim and the
team developed behaviors and strategies for interacting with guests within the virtual
worlds, emphasizing among ourselves that the spaces should not be merely very
decorative chat rooms. Evolving out of the very first CyberForum which included a key
encounter between Peter Lunenfeld and a regular Danish participant known only as
'skejs,' Mike Heim developed the notion of a reverse mem ory palace, a series of
locations which function as talking points or 'topoi' and which the team further layered
with what came to be called 'avatar rituals.' [4] This was a deliberate exploration of the
3D embodiment which such environments provide -- not at the direction of game play,
but rather arising from creative self expression, free-form play and a search for a sense of
larger purpose for these virtual spaces.

Many of the rituals were pre-planned, but quite a number arose spontaneously.
Sometimes speakers -- or guests -- derailed our plans, and other things happened instead.
The CyberForum events were the quintessential hybrid: a series of controlled chaos
experiments with a strong sense of direction, walking the edge between party, classroom
and literary salon. One often hears about the de-centralized virtues of the distributed
authority provided by the web as a model of shared power, and nowhere could this be
more evident than these CyberForum sessions, attended by students, the occasional
heckler, international academics and some truly great theorists and practitioners of digital
media. My proposal of an 'aesthetics of play' is intended -- in part - to encompass a
phenomenon like this series of author chats, though it has many other aspects as
well.

One notable avatar ritual which left a lasting mark
occurred in an unplanned and very accidental way. My 'Pinkie' avatar was not always so
uniform. [Fig. 3] and she used to have some very interesting waiting behaviors and a lot
of limitations which turned out to be quite fun. Certain dance tags would literally have
Pinkie fly apart in different directions -- the top one way, the bottom another. We ended
up discovering the 'Pinkie dance', as guest speaker Niranjan Rajah called it, in which the
playful effort at trying to switch tops and bottoms produced in the users an uncanny sense
of being there and created a genuine visceral memory of presence in this cyber-space and
avatar incarnation. [5] As we discovered, not only did this cross-identification of avatars
fulfill one of our stated goals -- the effort to move beyond chat and into some sort of
actual usefulness for 3D virtuality beyond or besides game play in the standard sense --
but it also leads to an increase in empathy, with some interesting implications.

The development of an aesthetic of empathy arises most easily in world with a limited
choice of avatars, and with a minimum of text. Browser features may change, but the
principle remains the same, that one may often be uncertain which avatar is yours in a
crowd. This sense of identity conflation with others, or even the sense that a subject
melds into a distributed group identity, offers a potential for an amplification of empathy,
which in turn points up some foundational social operations at the heart of these
interactive spaces.

Play and empathy are already understood as basic operations in the formation of identity
in developing children. [6] As we attempt to shift our consciousness into the new
dimension of cyberspace, we come to realize we need new ground rules for harmonious
socialization in a realm which simply does not adhere to the same rules as our own.
Rather than assume that the more realistic a simulation of our existing reality we can
import into virtual spaces the better, it makes sense to explore such spaces for what they
are -- to develop a phenomenology of 3D virtual spaces, as Heim has explored in his
numerous books. [7] As is well known by students of art history, artistic explorations are
a powerful way to push the boundaries of what we can do if we truly invest in the tools
and limitations which are present, or returning to Stein, to acknowledge what is "there
there," instead of imposing values inherited from other media.

This aesthetic foundation of play and empathy allows us to return to the theoretical
considerations I mentioned at the beginning, but with a fresh and practical appreciation of
what it means to be engaged in an artistic social process, one that is inclusive, distributed
and values the subjective. In art-historical terms, one can think of Joseph Beuys and his
'social sculptures' as an interesting counterpoint. In psychoanalytic terms, the theorization
of object relations and its applications to literature bring up the work of Donald
Winnicott, Christopher Bollas and Gabriel Schwab, thinkers who posit the transitional
object and transitional space as crucial to the formulation of an emerging subjectivity. In
feminist terms, the resistance of an essentialized or ventriloquized subject allows us to re-
consider the categories of the user and the avatar, both of which have been neglected as
specific entities with issues of their own. And in postcolonial terms, as Florian Roetzer
points out, the imperialist model of most virtual spaces has yet to be re-invented from a
colonizing and territorial gesture which as he puts it, simply re-inscribes cyberspace as an
American policy. [8] These are just a few examples of the kind of theoretical explorations
that an aesthetics of play and empathy allows us to open up in consideration of artistic
virtual environments. [9]

As another example, this type of theorization of 3D virtual worlds allows us to re-
consider key issues such as the nature of authorship. As I see it, the sense of pleasure or
flow that arises in play is often related to problem solving and pattern detection -- most
recognizable in the so-called fan productions, which are rife in such 3D virtual worlds.
[10] Fan productions are often dismissed, when they are in fact crucial to the economy of
play that characterizes such interactive spaces. An adherence to rigid aesthetic and
strictly formal concerns can prevent one from seeing the merits of such fan productions,
instead seeing them as mere i itation, or purely derivative -- all of which misses the point
completely. Allowing for an expanded definition of authorship, which flows with perfect
ease from any number of theoretical considerations whether it is Roland Barthes' death of
the author, a feminist critique of authority or, as I suggest, an aesthetics of play and
empathy, allows us to embrace the creativity and ponder the potential subversion of the
status quo which such fan productions suggest.

While play opportunity is not yet fully recognized as an aesthetic criterion, some
scholarship points the way to understanding the importance of creative, popular and
subversive trifling with the status quo. Anthropologist Victor Turner, literary and
historical theorists such as Johann Huizinga and Mikhail Bakhtin, critical theorist Michel
de Certeau, and the contemporary work of Michael Heim all point to opportunities for a
fresh examination of the role which play can have in assessing the merits of a 3D virtual
world. Critical theory tools which re-examine the subject, notions of authority and
authorship, and which question the traditional balance of power and models for
community allow us to open up the practice of creating 3D virtual worlds in directions
which are firstly appropriate to interactive media and which secondly advance agendas
already well established in the fine art world. As so many have said before, it is not the
technology but the content which makes for compelling user experiences. Yet it cannot
be emphasized enough that this content must be supported by the environment in which it
is embodied. An aesthetics of play and empathy for virtual worlds attempts to reconcile
experience, subjectivity and pleasure as a dynamic social process in dialogue with the
traditional fine art discourse. As such, the vocabulary is wide open and waiting to be
explored.

This paper and its title are drawn from a presentation commissioned by Dena
Elisabeth Eber for a session of the same name at Siggraph 2004, 31st International
Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, Los Angeles Convention
Center, Los Angeles, August 9, 2004. Due to space limitations, only a portion of the
topics can be covered here.

Images courtesy Michael Heim and/or Tobey Crockett
References:
[1] Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography (Exact Change: Berkely,
CA, 1993; first publ. 1937). Stein's famous quote about her birthplace is, "The trouble
with Oakland is that when you get there, there isn't any there there."

[6] See Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (Routledge
Books: Oxford, UK, 1982) for a good overview of the roles of play and empathy in
childhood development.

[7] Michael Heim is the author of several important books that address the
intersection of philosophy and the virtual. Electric Language: A Philosophical
Study of Word Processing (Yale University Press: New Haven, 1987), The
Metaphysics of Virtual Reality (Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 1994) and
Virtual Realism (Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK, 1998) are all
excellent reads which adopt a "middle path" between technophilia and critique.

[9] These and related topics are addressed more thoroughly in my doctoral dissertation, a
work in progress at the University of California, Irvine, in the PhD Program in Visual
Studies (estimated completion date June, 2006). My working title is "Towards A Theory
of Fun: Aesthetics of Play and Empathy in 3D Virtual Worlds." See www.tobeycrockett.com
for more information about my work.

[10] Pleasure or flow is indebted to the work of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, while an
economy of fan productions discussion has been advanced by Will Wright, among many
others. Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredomand Anxiety: Experiencing
Flow in Work and Play (Jossey-Bass Publishers: San Francisco, 1975). See Celia
Pearce's interview with Will Wright: Celia Pearce, "Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Au tomata
God and Go " in Games Studies 2.1 (2002), http://www.gamestudies.org/0102/pearce/